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AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 On Linux

08-12-2008, 08:10 AM

Phoronix: AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 On Linux

While details on AMD's high-end ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card began surfacing last month, today this dual-GPU graphics card has formally launched and will begin shipping to retailers. The good news this time around is that this graphics card will actually be something worth looking at under Linux now that there's the needed CrossFire support on the horizon. We're not yet permitted to publish the Linux CrossFire benchmarks, but today we have a few pieces of information to share about the Radeon HD 4870 X2 on Linux.

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Oh sure, Crossfire support! I wish they would support the latest XOrg (the one used by Fedora 9) instead! Got this great new card and I haven't been able to use it AT ALL in the last couple of months. Even video stutters. *sigh*

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Oh sure, Crossfire support! I wish they would support the latest XOrg (the one used by Fedora 9) instead! Got this great new card and I haven't been able to use it AT ALL in the last couple of months. Even video stutters. *sigh*

First things first, the demand for crossfire under Linux has been there for a much longer time than the demand for Xorg 7.4 support.
Apart from that, that Xorg "release" is not even out or considered stable yet. The official Catalyst driver, as bridgman once stated, is intended for everyday use on stable systems, which don't use the bleeding-edge development trees, whereas radeon and radeonhd are intended to support them.

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First things first, the demand for crossfire under Linux has been there for a much longer time than the demand for Xorg 7.4 support.
Apart from that, that Xorg "release" is not even out or considered stable yet. The official Catalyst driver, as bridgman once stated, is intended for everyday use on stable systems, which don't use the bleeding-edge development trees, whereas radeon and radeonhd are intended to support them.

If fglrx doesn't work, you are forced to go git master to get your card working with radeon/radeonhd. If ATI later says "we fixed it", it would much easier if I could try it out myself on X.Org 7.4 rather than spending the evening downgrading to 7.3 only to discover that it still doesn't work and then having to upgrade again to git.

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If fglrx doesn't work, you are forced to go git master to get your card working with radeon/radeonhd. If ATI later says "we fixed it", it would much easier if I could try it out myself on X.Org 7.4 rather than spending the evening downgrading to 7.3 only to discover that it still doesn't work and then having to upgrade again to git.

hm.. I see where your problem is; however, then you could also stick with Xorg 7.3 and use radeonHD 1.0, so you need only one downgrade at all. But if you insist on having 3d acceleration it's not as easy as "if fglrx doesn't work I use radeon(hd)", exactly because of what you described. One must decide wether he sticks with some 3d accel that works with radeon(hd) or wether he gets full 3d accel IF he gets his fglrx running.
I guess in your case it'd be best to spent ~5GB for a second distribution installation in order to test wether a new fglrx release fixed your problem.

I now that's not really the answer you want to hear, but it's the sad reality that binary blobs don't fit too well in the OSS world

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I now that's not really the answer you want to hear, but it's the sad reality that binary blobs don't fit too well in the OSS world

This is true, of course. But I wish AMD had gone the NVidia way; ignore the standards and do your own thing. On NVidia right now, the Linux Desktop/Gaming experience seems much better. I think there's a reason why you see a "don't use ATI, go NVidia" message when you install Cedega. NVidia seems to have invested more in their binary blobs than AMD has. If you provide a binary blob and refuse to open source it so others can fix it, at least fix it yourself dammit :P